Fedora Weekly News Issue 179

In this, the issue immediately prior to the impending release of Fedora 11, we have a fine bevy of news for you. Fedora elections are open for voting in the various positions, please participate if you are eligible. John Polestra has also been elected to the Fedora Board for a two release term. From around the Fedora Planet, Fedora 11 podcasts, details on fingerprint authentication in F11, and thoughts on ensuring Fedora teams sustainability from Fedora leader Paul W. Frields. In Ambassadors, a reminder to please send in news about upcoming Fedora events in your area. In QA news, details on this past weekly meeting, deeply focused in pre-Fedora 11 final testing and pre-upgrade status. In the Translation beat, the release notes for Fedora 11 have been completed and are ready for translation rebuild after the Fedora 11 Release Announcement. The Fedora Localization Project welcomed new contributors for Latvian and Russian, Chinese, Italian, traditional Chinese and Korean and Spanish this past week! The Fedora Design team is already thinking about Fedora 12 'themeability' of some of the proposed codenames for F12. Also some great artwork for an upcoming FUDCon in Porto Alegre-RS, Brazil. In Security news, details on .ORG becoming the first top-level domain to sign their zone with DNSSEC and implications for other domains. Our issue this week rounds up with news from virtualization teams, including updates on libvirt 0.6.4, thoughts of virtualization features for Fedora 12, and much more. Enjoy!

We are still looking for several writers to take up dormant beats in Fedora development, OLPC, and other potential areas. If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

Fedora Board

John Poelstra[1] has been appointed to the Fedora Board, for a two-release term. Paul Frields[2] wrote[3], "Many of our contributors know John from his work in many capacities around the Project, from work with the Fedora Bug Zappers, maintaining our release schedule, and facilitating meetings for many of our community teams. He will bring a unique perspective and experience to our team."

FUDCons and FADs

Fedora Activity Day: Development Cycle

In North America, Jesse Keating announced[1] an upcoming Fedora Activity Day[2] "for maintainers, QA, and release engineering folks to meet and discuss ongoing issues with the Fedora Development Cycle and to create a proposal on how to fix many of the issues. Note, this is not an event to decide on a solution, it is an event to decide on a proposal, which will then be shared with the whole community for more input and work."

Planet Fedora

General

Thorsten Leemhuis explained[1] why he believes that Fedora should ensure that kmods work well, while leaving the actual kmods themselves in RPM Fusion.

Jack Aboutboul linked[2] to the Fedora 11 Podcast interview with Jonathan Dieter about Presto, which allows users to update their RPM-based system without having to download entire RPM files (only their deltas are downloaded).

Jef Spaleta announced[3] that a record 1,996,040 unique IPs accessed fedoraproject.org over May 2009.

Peter Hutterer explained[4] how X handles mouse button mappings (it's not as easy as you think!) and continued[5] with "XI2 Recipes, Part 1" and example programs that can support multiple mouse cursors and keyboard foci.

Karsten Wade wrote[6] about the process necessary to vote in the FESCo and Fedora Board election, from signing the CLA to joining a contributing sub-project.

Dave Malcolm released[8] a new version (0.4) of squeal, the command line text query tool, with a number of new features include the ability to handle arbitrary text files (split on whitespace like awk, or use regular expressions) and support for pcap (tcpdump/wireshark) dump files.

Max Spevack answered[9] the age-old question "why is Fedora always released on a Tuesday?"

Paul W. Frields published[10] a "Fedora teams’ call to action" which might be described as a number of important points to make Fedora teams more "sustainable" (how would a team cope if a contributor was eaten by a dinosaur?)

Ambassadors

Fedora 11 released this week

Fedora 11 will be released on Tuesday, June 9, and with it a variety of activities around the release will be forthcoming. As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 11, this is a reminder that posting your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, as we are deep in the Fedora 11 final release run-up.

Currently, no Test Day is scheduled for next week - it is too close to the scheduled release of Fedora 11 for any testing to produce results directly in Fedora 11 final release, but if you would like to propose a test day which could result in changes for post-release updates, or an early test day for Fedora 12, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[1].

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-06-03. The full log is available[2]. Adam Williamson reported that he had finally remembered to ask the Bugzilla team to add a link to the Fedora bug workflow page[3] from the Bugzilla page[4]. This has been done, and the link will show up with the next refresh of Bugzilla.

James Laska reported that he has now sent out the survey about Fedora 11 Test Days, asking participants for feedback on how the events went and any possible improvements that could be made[5]. Some feedback had already been received, and much more was expected.

Will Woods reported that he had added two test cases for preupgrade [6], [7], and updated the release candidate test matrix for RC3[8].

The group discussed how to handle the installation test result matrix wiki page[9] between release candidate revisions. James Laska committed to work out his best solution and send it to the mailing list.

Adam Williamson reported that he had added an entry to the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page[10] for bug #502077[11], but that the bug would now be fixed for final release and so the note should be removed. He clarified that issues which will be fixed for final release should just be removed from the page, not moved to the planned 'Resolved Issues' section.

The group discussed the state of Fedora 11 final release preparation. In general building of release candidates and testing was progressing smoothly. James Laska asked that the group make an effort to confirm the fixes for the nine release-critical issues marked as MODIFIED in Bugzilla.

The group then discussed the appropriate way to document bug #503824[12], where installation fails in certain circumstances on an x86-64 system with only 512MB of memory. In the end it was decided the most appropriate way to address this would be in the minimum hardware requirements. Adam Williamson volunteered to add a request for some appropriate text to be added to an existing bug report on revision of the minimum requirements.

James Laska then started a brainstorming session for a general review of QA's role during the Fedora 11 cycle. Many ideas were contributed by the entire group. A summary of these is available on the meeting page[13].

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[14] was held on 2009-06-02. The full log is available[15]. John Poelstra reported on progress of the housekeeping changes for Fedora 11's release, and the group agreed that he was doing a fine job and should keep it up.

Adam Williamson reported on the progress of the triage metric system. The system[16] is now running on the real Bugzilla data, updated nightly. The system is now in its beta stage, and the developer Brennan Ashton asks that people experiment with it and report bugs or feature requests to trac[17] (component triageweb).

Adam Williamson also reported on the progress of the proposal to include setting the priority / severity fields as part of triage. It is now waiting on a change by the Bugzilla maintainers to restrict access to the priority and severity fields. This is being tracked in a bug report[18]. Niels Haase noted that he had already begun setting severity on reports he is triaging, according to the policy, and had not yet met with any resistance on the part of reporters. The group agreed that triagers could go ahead and begin setting the severity field ahead of the change to Bugzilla, if they would like to.

Niels Haase flagged up a bug[19] for possible inclusion in the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page. It involves resume from suspend failing when using the nouveau graphics driver. After some discussion, the group agreed it should be added to the list.

John Poelstra announced that he would be stepping back from some of his leadership role within the BugZappers group, though remaining involved in many ways. The group thanked him for all his efforts so far. Adam Williamson, Edward Kirk and Niels Haase will cover meeting arrangements for the foreseeable future.

Steven Parrish mentioned that he intended to go through all still-open Fedora 9 bugs for the components he triages, and try to determine whether they were still valid for a current release (and if so change them to that release), in advance of the automated closing of Fedora 9 bugs for EOL. Adam Williamson suggested he also mention this idea on the mailing list.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-06-10 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-06-09 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Release candidate build availability

Following on from last week's discussion of the availability of release candidate builds, Andre Robatino announced[1] that he had built and made available delta ISOs - files containing the difference between two ISO images, allowing the reconstruction of the latest final image - for RC2, from Fedora 11 Preview. He later made delta ISOs available for RC3 and RC4. The group continued to discuss the feasibility of getting quickly-revised pre-release builds available from the public mirror system using various methods, but no conclusion has yet been reached.

Bugzilla statistics

Brennan Ashton released[1] the first weekly Bugzilla statistics roundup, derived from the new triage metrics system. The response was enthusiastic, with requests and suggestions for more information from Jóhann Guðmundsson[2] and Christopher Beland[3]. There were also several positive responses on the development mailing list, where the information was also posted.

'How to report bugs' page revised

Adam Williamson announced[1] that he had made some changes to the main Wiki page on how to report bugs[2]. In particular, he had revised the section providing advice on what information to include in particular types of bug report to be more consistent. He encouraged everyone to contribute this type of information: if you know of specific information which is usually required when filing a particular type of bug (or a bug on a particular component), add this information following the layout used in the appropriate section of the page[3].

Fedora 11 Test Day survey

James Laska posted a survey[1] on the Fedora 11 Test Day process, asking for feedback on various facets of the process and suggestions for future improvements. The response was wide and enthusiastic, across both the QA and the development mailing lists, with many useful and constructive suggestions from testers and developers alike. James and Adam Williamson responded to several of the suggestions, affirming that many would be considered for implementation during the Fedora 12 Test Day cycle.

Translation

Fedora 11 Release Notes on docs.fedoraproject.org

John J. McDonough announced that all the suggestions related to the Fedora 11 Release Notes have been updated on docs.fedoraproject.org[1]. The languages updated after this build would be rebuilt after the Fedora 11 Release Announcement and posteed on docs.fedoraproject.org.

Artwork

Looking Forward to Fedora 12 Themes

On behalf of the Board and as part of the process to select a code name for Fedora 12[1]Paul Frields asked for input[2] on @design-team: "As you're probably aware we are working early on the F12 naming process, to provide the Fedora Design team plenty of time for theming the next release, as requested". He is trying to find out if the candidates on the the list going from Board to Legal have the potential for a visual theme: "I would like the Design team to look at these names and give me some indication of their themeability". Various members of the team outlined directions which can be followed for any of the candidates, with the general opinion being favourable[3]: "after a quick read of the list, I don't see anything as unthemeable as "sulphur", so any of the choices are acceptable IMO".

Graphics for FUDCon - LATAM

Jayme Ayres reported[1] and asked for feedback on @design-team about a number of graphics he made for the upcoming FUDCon LATAM[2] in Porto Alegre, Brazil: "Here are the designs that we use in Fudcon LATAM at FISL 10 (Porto Alegre-RS - Brasil). The posters will still be chosen, only the poster of FUDCon is approved."

Media Art Adjustments

At the last minute Max Spevack reported[1] a number of issues encountered by the media production company with the Fedora 11 media art: "The artwork is too big", "All files related to the CD/DVD case contain transparencies and this could bring some problems by printing out the files", "there's a no-embedded font", "In the labels is indicated a missing font". The problems were solved[2] quickly by Máirín Duffy with an update[3] of the files.

Security Week

.ORG DNSSEC

This week .ORG became the first open generic TLD to sign their zone with DNSSEC
[1]

This is sort of a big deal, as most everyone agrees DNSSEC[2] will happen in the future, but nobody has really taken any steps to make it happen. It falls in the same bucket as IPv6. It will happen, it will be nice when it does, but it's going very very slowly.

Many organizations will be watching how this goes for .ORG, if it goes well, it's quite likely DNSSEC will see rapid deployment, but if it goes bad, it may slow things even more than they currently are.

New virt-inspector Features

"First up is a new 'query mode'"
which prints "out some useful facts about the virtual machine such
as whether it's fully virtualized or needs a Xen hypervisor, and
whether it has various paravirt drivers installed."

"Secondly (not covered in the manpage), virt-inspector will try to
discover whether a VM contains the right initrd drivers and module
configuration to boot under various hypervisors. So for example it
can tell you whether a guest has the virtio drivers available at boot
time to boot from a virtio disk."

"Updates are being pushed regularily to the virt-preview repository"[3]

"Jeremy Fitzhardinge's latest submission of the Xen Dom0 patches for 2.6.31 has caused the kernel community to get themselves into a bit of a flap. LWN has a nice article[4] on the 'discussion'"

Gerd Hoffmann
followed[5]
up with some details on the controversial bits.
"lapic + ioapic. That is the big hot topic. Current code lacks
sensible interfaces to the different apic types out there in the
wild. The current dom0 patches hook just into that mess instead
of cleaning it up. Right now it looks like Jeremy has to sort
that mess to get the xen bits in, using the to-be-created apic
interfaces."

"No way the apic stuff will make it into the 2.6.31 merge window opening RSN, the work on that barely started. Thus we can expect functional dom0 support upstream in 2.6.32 earliest."

"Also noteworthy: There is a discussion on xen-devel regarding the future of the xen linux trees. Which one should be used & maintained and so on."
"Looks like Keir seriously considers switching xen-unstable to the pv_ops kernel by default. YES! FINALLY! Well, it is probably to early to uncork the champagne, but I think we can at least put a bottle into the fridge ;)"

Libvirt List

New Release libvirt 0.6.4

"There is a number of new things in that release, but as happens in
time-based releases some are not fully complete, for example the
OpenNebula driver was added but it still need a bit of work on the
detection code and a bit of cleanup to avoid a GPL/AFS licencing
issue, so please don't enable it except for test builds. We also
have a new set of Interface config APIs but they are not yet
implemented by a driver and the XML import/export routines are not
there yet. Still there is a lot of things to use and discover in this
release as you can see below:"